


Five Times Tony Stark Almost Died

by Deannie



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-19 23:56:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2407601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark has been dying since he was born. Here's five times he almost did and one time they figured out why he didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Five Times Tony Stark Almost Died

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Shaz for the beta—you awesome!

**1970**

The first time Tony Stark almost died, he was too young to know it.

_Howard Stark, however, wasn’t. Howard was fifty-three years old and terrified._

_He’d faced down more than most in his life, but the door to the champagne bedroom in his sprawling mansion was something else entirely. He couldn’t outwit this. It wasn’t an enemy he could confront. He couldn’t create something to defeat it. The important creating had already happened, eight months before..._

“Mr. Stark,” Greta’s voice was quiet, worried. “The doctor is here.”

There wasn’t supposed to be a doctor. Howard didn’t believe in doctors or hospitals for this sort of thing. Maria didn’t either. Hospitals were for the truly sick, or where you went to _get_ truly sick.

Maria was nearly forty, yes, and she had had a difficult pregnancy, but this was supposed to be a normal child. A normal birth. At home with the midwife. In a month’s time.

Howard almost laughed at himself. He’d never had a normal life, why should now be different? Of course the child was coming early—his batting average when it came to experiments almost dictated it. And what was creating a child, after all, but the ultimate experimentation?

He cleared his throat, trying to dislodge the terror climbing up from his chest. Behind the door he’d been staring at for nearly five hours now lay the two most important people in his life. The fact that he hadn’t met one of them yet meant nothing. “Hurry him up.”

The bleeding wouldn’t stop. That was what the midwife had said when she got here and examined Maria. They’d called her, scared but hopeful at three in the morning when Maria’s water had broken. The baby was early, the water was tinged with red, and they had all known that was wrong. Still, they’d hoped.

But the bleeding wouldn’t stop and the baby wouldn’t come and Maria’s voice had stopped coming through the oaken door an hour ago. No baby cried, no wife screamed in the pain of delivery...

Howard had spent the first forty-some years of his life thinking that settling down was for suckers and the next ten loving a remarkable woman and trying to add to their family. And now, when he and she were finally steps away from that goal, he stood to lose them both.

“Howard!” Dr. Tilman strode toward him, surgical bag at his side. Howard shook his hand gravely. “How’s she doing?”

“The bleeding won’t stop, John,” he muttered. “You have to help them. Please?”

“I’ll do everything I can, Howard,” he promised. “I’ll let you know if I need you.” And then he was gone.

 _”I’ll let you know if I need you.”_ To say goodbye. To say goodbye before he could even say hello.

Howard paced because he couldn’t stay still any longer. He’d been a fool to believe he could do this. Have a wife. Raise a child. He wasn’t made for these things—he was a war monger. Everyone said so. It was what he did. Nothing else he’d ever accomplished meant a damn thing to the world. According to the press, his wife and coming child were just indulgences. She was a trophy wife, almost fifteen years his junior and stunning besides. She’d married him for his money and he’d hoped she’d give him an heir...

The press and public opinion hadn’t gotten a damn thing right in a million years, and they weren’t right about him. He knew the world was destined to be different—better. He and Maria wanted a child of their own. Someone to reap the benefits he knew would come, once technology caught up to dreamers like him. He wanted that child to help change the world, to succeed where he knew he’d fail.

But the door to that future stayed resolutely closed and his wife and child remained deathly silent behind it.

“Howard?”

He had no idea how long he’d paced. John Tilman’s voice, however, froze him solid. He couldn’t turn to face him.

“Howard, come with me,” John said, putting an arm around his shoulders. The doctor smelled of blood, his hands still red around the edges. “Come say hello to your son.”

The words barely registered, but Howard let himself be led. It wasn’t until he saw Maria, reclining pale and exhausted, cradling an infant who seemed far too small, that he managed to gather his wits about him.

“Howard, he’s here,” she whispered, spent and joyous all at once. The bundle let loose one mewling sigh and Maria turned it in her arms so he could see. “Always in a rush and making things hard for everyone. He must be a Stark.”

Tiny, scrawny, dark hair and florid face.

God, he’d been a fool to think he could do this! He looked up at John, who had a brooding look about him, as if to say the child wasn’t out of danger. _Maria?_ Howard asked with his eyes. John smiled at that, and Howard took heart that he might not lose everything.

“What shall we call him, love?” Maria asked, smiling in that way that all new mothers had, no matter how pale and sickly the child might be.

Howard froze. They had to name the child. He somehow had to raise this child. He should grow up strong, smart, better than his father in every important way…

They had to name him.

“Anthony,” he blurted out, staring at a child who looked like he wouldn’t live the year. Howard’s father had been Anthony. His father had been brilliant.

“Anthony,” Maria agreed with a sleepy smile. “Tony.”

Howard nodded, wondering how he could possibly feel _more_ terrified now that the child had a name. “Tony it is.”

****

**1976**

The second time he almost died, he was too young to understand what it meant, but the ramifications of it would be felt for the rest of his life. It would be forty years before he understood them.

_Despite his rocky start, or possibly because of it, Tony Stark not only lived, he thrived._

_It was impossible that the child of an utter genius, who was also one of the richest men in America, should grow up normal, but even attempting normal was beyond Tony. He was brilliant in a way that often frightened his mother. The risks he took, he took because he could see eight steps ahead of everyone else._

_The only one he couldn’t best was his father. But Howard had his own fears for his son, and they made him seem hard and cold toward the child he and Maria had wanted so badly. Howard was often away on “business,” but that business was rarely what his young child thought it was. The S.H.I.E.L.D. initiative was one hare-brained, horrifying lesson in the depravity of Man after another, and Howard, who had never really recovered from the terror of becoming a father, had to make sure his son was able to protect himself. Tony had to be taught to make his way in a world that was harsher than most people knew, and that meant being tough on him._

_Tony was his father’s son in most respects, though, so the strictures Howard put on him were seen as challenges, and he attacked them with vigor and humor and a doggedness almost unmatched. He overcame most of them, too. Like the injunction_ never _to enter the lab—and especially the radiation room—without his father’s permission, under any circumstances...._

“So what do you think, Howard? Ten percent?” Bill Carson stood beside the power monitors in the private lab at Howard Stark’s estate. The two thousand square foot, concrete-lined space built into the bedrock below the mansion was better supplied than most university labs and allowed Howard to keep his most private work private.

The radiation room they were working in today was tucked away a little farther into the bedrock, dug out away from the house to protect Maria and Tony in case of an accident. It was also dark and a little spooky, according to Tony.

Bill smiled at the thought of the bright, hyper boy who was more like Howard than either would ever admit. Little Tony had been in here with Howard the last time Bill had been here, and Howard had been explaining exactly what each apparatus did, as if a six-year-old child could understand advanced radiation theory.

Funny thing was, though? Bill could swear the kid did, at least in part. He soaked up every word his father said, committing it all to memory.

“That should do it,” Howard agreed, pulling Bill back to the present. Stark stood beside the main radiation chamber, ready to keep an eye on the shielding they’d had to double for this experiment. Howard had never stopped looking for Abraham Erskine’s Holy Grail, and while he knew they’d never replicate Erskine’s serum completely, some of the ones S.H.I.E.L.D.’s medical unit had come up with were very promising.

The plant they’d placed in the chamber was normal in every way, except that it had been bred to be susceptible to Higgin beetles. So they’d infested it with them. Now that they’d administered Serum 138, they just had to expose it to the proper level of radiation and hope the thing could learn to heal itself.

“We’ll start small,” Howard murmured, gesturing for Bill to go ahead and activate the coils. He heard the bottles on the table behind him shake a little at the vibration, but didn’t bother to look at them. The vibration in the room with this experiment was intense, after all. Things were bound to shift.

“Ten percent and holding steady,” Bill confirmed quietly, timing the exposure and shutting down the power matrix after the requisite eighty seconds. “Anything?”

Howard waited for his own board to show green, then peered into the tank. “Doesn’t look like it.” He made a note in his notebook and sighed. “Try going up to twenty?”

“All right,” Bill wasn’t sure he thought much of that idea, but he raised the levels and turned on the power. The room hummed in a more pronounced way and his palms started sweating. “Is the new shielding holding up okay?”

Howard frowned and looked at the side of the radiation chamber, checking tank integrity.

“Could be better,” He admitted. “We might have to—”

Before Bill could shut down the exposure, the door of the tank shot straight off, toward the table of test tubes and tanks, as a bright light lit the room. Someone screamed—a short, high, child’s scream—and Bill’s blood ran abruptly cold as the table slammed onto its side, revealing little Tony, lying awkwardly against the wall.

Something white and milky was running down the side of his face and Bill looked in horror at the broken flasks around him. There was no telling which compound he’d been exposed to—or how bad the radiation exposure would make it...

“Shut it down!” Howard screamed, his own horror all too plain as he knelt beside his son and reached out to touch his face, only to pull back as the liquid continued to dribble out of the boy’s hair. Howard’s voice was the barest whisper suddenly. “Jesus, Tony!”

He pulled himself together, taking the rag Bill handed him and wiping off what he could.

“Bill, call John Tilman and get him the hell up here—and get me a geiger counter now!” He slipped his hands under his son’s knees and shoulders and lifted him gently until he was cradling him against his chest. “I have to get him into a shower—wash this off. God, how did he get in here?” Tony’s eyes opened briefly as Howard stood, but Bill didn’t think the child could see anything. “Tony?” Howard called, desperate. He let Bill run the geiger counter over them both, and Bill felt sick when he saw the numbers. “Son, can you hear me?”

Bill undid the latches and slammed the door open, running for the phone in the main lab as Howard headed for the stairs, calling for Greta to get a shower going—hot. John Tilman assured him he’d be there in half an hour, and Bill, not knowing what else to do, headed upstairs himself.

“Mr. Stark is in the champagne room, sir,” Jarvis told him, worry plain on his face. Bill headed for the guest room he’d stayed in a few times, when experiments ran too late to face the trip back home. He could hear Maria from the en suite bathroom, demanding to know what happened, and Howard, focusing solely on Tony, trying to get the boy to answer him.

“What in God’s name were you doing there, Tony?” Howard asked, loudly to make sure the child would hear him over the spray of water. He stood in the shower fully clothed and sopping wet, cradling a stripped Tony and scrubbing his son’s skin and hair fiercely.

“I just wanted to watch,” Tony finally whispered, causing Howard to nearly fall in relief. Tony didn’t speak again, but Howard regained a bit of poise at the answer and finished rinsing the soap from Tony’s skin. Bill could only hope they’d gotten it off in time.

It seemed hours later that things had calmed down. Tilman had examined Tony and diagnosed nothing worse than a concussion. The radiation levels were already well down and they were hopeful there’d be no lasting effects from such a brief exposure. Tony was sleeping in the bed in the guest room, with Maria standing guard over him, trying to hide all evidence that she’d been crying. She didn’t try to hide her fury at her husband, though.

“Howard, he could have been _killed_!” She grated. “Why was the door to the main lab not locked?”

“He knows well enough not to come in without my permission, Maria,” Howard defended himself badly. “And he knows the radiation bunker is off-limits.”

“He is six years old, Howard Stark,” she shot back. “You just had him in there last week—you didn’t think he’d want to see?! He wants to be with his father. He wants to watch what you do. _You_ are the adult here. It’s your job to protect him.”

Howard couldn’t have looked more terrified nor more hurt if she had decked him. Bill just stared at his boss, certain he’d never seen the man so at a loss.

“He’ll be all right, Maria,” Bill assured her quietly, stepping in where Howard simply couldn’t right now. “The radiation was negligible. He’ll be fine.”

Bill was pretty certain he was lying—they hadn’t even had a chance to try some of the compounds on that table and had no idea what they might do—but he couldn’t stand the look of utter loss on either parent’s face. He looked down at Tony to see dark, confused eyes looking back at him for a moment before they closed.

 _God,_ he prayed. _Please don’t let me be lying._

*******

**1991**

It would be fifteen years before Tony almost died again. It was one of the few times when being a hurt, headstrong child could be a saving grace.

_After the accident, Howard Stark realized it was too dangerous to keep his son and his research in the same place. Tony was safer to relocate. And it was safer for Howard to know that he couldn’t fail as a father if he wasn’t there to do it._

_Tony spent years at boarding schools, coming home for vacations, only to find himself wanting to return to school as soon as possible. He loved his mother, but she was busy. And his dad was never really there. In more bitter moments, he wondered if that was what made their marriage work. He could never understand the undeniable love between them, given his father’s complete lack of attention to his wife and child._

_Especially his child._

_Howard Stark had been to his son’s graduation from MIT three years ago, but when Tony called from Cambridge to confirm that his parents would be there to see the doctoral cowl placed around his neck, his mother had been vague in her excuses for the fact that only she would be attending._

_He wasn’t sure why she was surprised when he refused to go to the gala celebrating Howard Stark’s many contributions to science just two weeks later…._

“I’m not going, Mom,” he told his mother, who was dressed to the nines and looking at him in his swimming trunks with great disapproval. “I have some business of my own I have to take care of.”

“Anthony Stark,” his mother scolded. “This is important to us—to your father.”

Tony snorted. He didn’t really care about how important the damn gala was to his dad. Dad had made it perfectly clear exactly what he thought of his son’s accomplishments. Tony couldn’t do any less, could he?

Besides, who the hell gave a weapons manufacturer a humanitarian award?

“Tony, I know you’re angry—” she started, trying again to play the go-between for them.

“I’m not, Mom,” he said, striving for a carefree tone. It wasn’t like it was her fault, right? “I’m not. It’s—It’s nothing less than I expect from him, right?” He looked up at the stairs, where his father was descending, dressed in a fine suit of his own. Tony gave his mother a soft kiss on the cheek in apology. “It’s nothing less than what he expects from me, either,” he murmured. “Have fun, okay? We’ll have lunch tomorrow?” He grinned at her sad smile and escaped, turning and heading for the pool before his father hit the ground floor.

Of course the old man had to come out and give him a piece of his mind. It was what they did. Tony pushed and Dad pushed back and Tony pushed some more.

“Tony,” he father said coldly. “Shouldn’t you be more appropriately dressed?”

“Mom’s already made it very clear how she feels about nude sunbathing, Dad,” he quipped back. “I’ll just have to deal with the tan lines.”

“Damn it, Tony…”

His dad shook his head, and he had that look in his eyes. He was feeling nostalgic tonight, or wistful, or whatever. When he got like this, he promised things—explanations. More time. More attention. It never did pan out.

“I hoped we could talk, now you’re done with school. There are things I’ve never told you. About what I do. About why I do it.” Poor guy sounded almost apologetic. Not apologetic enough to admit, for once, that maybe his son wasn’t a complete fuck up, but sorry all the same. “I need you to understand those things one day, Tony. I always hoped, maybe, you could be a part of it.”

Tony had figured out years ago that his old man wasn’t exactly who he said he was—maybe tonight would be the night he spilled the beans. After spending the last twenty-one years with a father too busy to be with him, Tony’d earned that much, right? He just wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it.

“Sir,” Jarvis called from the house. “Mrs. Stark is waiting for you in the car.”

Tony settled back on his pool bed. Thank God—saved by the butler.

“Better get going, Dad,” Tony said, closing his eyes and closing out his father. “You know how Mom hates to be late.”

“I would have liked for you to come with us, Tony.”

Tony opened his eyes and speared his dad with a cool stare. “I would’ve liked you there at my party, too.” He tilted his head at his father’s hurt look and grinned flatly. “Can't always get what you want, can you?”

“When we come home… I’ll explain it to you,” his dad promised. He’d said stuff like that before, but this time there was something in his tone. Maybe.... “I just hope you’ll be ready to listen.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Tony muttered to himself as his dad headed to the front door. He squelched the vain hope that things might be different for them someday. “Reap what you sow, old man. Live with it.”

Tony wasn’t _exactly_ waiting up for them when the knock came at the door, six hours later. One-thirty was late for anyone to be calling, and as he came down the stairs, Tony looked out the window to see flashing lights. He’d been back in the States all of a day. The police couldn’t be harassing him already.

He was nearly to the foyer when he heard Jarvis give a gasp.

“Jarvis?” His heart clenched a little. He’d never heard their butler make a noise like that. “What’s going on?” Another reason for the flashing lights began to niggle at his mind...

“Mr. Stark?” A tall, bushy-haired Irishman stood in the doorway, looking apologetic. Tony had seen enough apologetic looks for one day. He came up next to Jarvis and put a hand on his shoulder. The old man was shaking.

“Lieutenant Dugan,” Tony said. They knew each other—his uncle was one of Dad’s friends from way back. When he was just a patrolman, the poor guy had driven a drunk sixteen-year-old Tony home once. Or possibly twice. “What’s going on?” He was repeating himself and he was scared.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to come with me, sir,” Dugan said. Tony bristled at the “sir”—at the whole situation. Jarvis shaken and Dugan apologetic...

“Mom and Dad…” he barely let the words pass his lips, but they sealed his fate regardless. The fact that, had he listened to his mother, he’d’ve been in that car as well failed to register. Later, though, he’d occasionally wish he’d indulged her. He'd wish he'd listened when he father spoke, too, but that was equally pointless.

“I’m sorry, Tony. There’s been an accident.”

*******

**2007**

Sixteen years passed before another opportunity to die arose. This time he was just too damn stubborn to take it.

_With his father’s death, Tony Stark became arguably the most powerful businessman in the world. Stark Industries flourished, diversifying into medical imaging and three-dimensional data presentation structures—visual information technologies that were one of Tony’s particular fields of brilliance. Another was “things that go boom,” and they remained the bread and butter of his company._

_Tony himself changed very little. He was still the brash, forward, thoughtless, and empty man who thought too far ahead of anyone else to stop long enough to attach himself. Oh, he had friends, certainly. Well, he had Happy, who worked for him. And Pepper Potts, who worked for him. Rhodey was a liaison with the military, now—that was as good as working for him._

_He had employees. Who he liked._

_In the split second before he felt his chest blown apart in the middle of the Afghan desert, Tony was somehow perversely heartened that he had, in a fit of childish pique, kicked one of those selfsame people-who-he-liked out of the humvee he was riding in. The humvee that became part of the shrapnel cloud that should have killed him…._

Ho Yinsen looked down at the man on the cot before him and sighed, hoping for a quick death for the boy. And he was a boy, still. Oh, much older than Yinsen’s son had been, certainly, but immature. Childish. Yinsen hadn’t attended a research conference in a very long time, but he was sure that Tony Stark was still blindingly drunk and simultaneously brilliant at each and every one of them.

And now he lay here, in a cave in the middle of the desert. A walking dead man. It had been two and a half days since the surgery and Stark was recovering remarkably well, but had shown no signs of waking. Their captors were getting impatient.

“Yinsen!” Abu Bakaar, the less intelligent of the two leaders of this terrorist band, slammed the door open and bellowed for him. Yinsen leapt to his feet, fingers laced behind his head in submission. “Is he still alive?”

“Yes,” Yinsen answered, speaking his captor’s language instead of his own. “I do not know for how long—”

“If he does not wake by sunrise tomorrow, you will die,” the fat, ugly man said, striding back out of the sprawling room. It was just another of the man’s random, brief, almost comedic intrusions into Yinsen’s life.

Yinsen snorted at the empty threat and resumed his seat beside the young American. “Promises, promises,” he muttered, staring at the miracle on the cot.

Tony Stark should not have survived the surgery. Yinsen was not a humble man—he was as fine a surgeon as he was an engineer, but he should not have been able to save a man with more shrapnel in his chest than on the ground around him. Stark’s heart had stopped three times as Yinsen worked, only to begin beating again on its own. Almost as if he was as indestructible as he had always seemed to think himself to be.

“You have survived for a reason, I think, Mr. Stark,” he murmured, glad to have someone—even an unconscious someone—to speak to. “I wonder if we will both live long enough to see what that reason is.”

Twenty hours later—just before sunrise—Tony Stark awoke, saving Bakaar from having to come up with an excuse not to kill them both. Yinsen watched as Stark recovered, sat, spoke, rose, walked—all in the space of a day.

He watched that stubbornness falter in the face of Stark’s own guilt, and knew that something had to be done. Stark was alive for a reason, after all, wasn’t he? It was not to wallow. Yinsen chose his words carefully, prodding, challenging… and like a coin flipping of its own accord, Stark rose with purpose and fought as he had fought on the surgical table less than a week before. His own survival was his first order of business, and his answer to it was far beyond what any normal man—any normal genius, even—would have thought possible.

As the days and then weeks went on, Yinsen learned more about the man he had only ever seen as a self-indulgent fop, too intelligent to be refused, certainly, but lacking any real substance. There was substance—with something to put his genius to work on, Stark was driven, tireless, bent on both revenge and justice—but he could also be petty, childish, whining. Through two months of plotting and planning and creating, Yinsen never changed his initial opinion—in some ways Tony Stark was, indeed, still a child. An orphan, in fact.

“So you are a man who has everything. And nothing,” Yinsen observed, watching Stark smile sadly at his observation as they shared a game one night. Stark had been asking about Yinsen’s family, but somehow, after eight weeks of captivity together, the questions did not set off the pain they might have.

“I had…” Stark trailed off, as if he was not sure what he meant to say. “My um, dad—well, you know who my dad was. He and Mom died when I was twenty-one. I guess they had enough trouble having me, so, only child. Our butler—the guy who took care of me, actually, most of the time—Jarvis. He died a couple of years later.”

“I am sorry.”

“You know, before he died, my dad told me there was a reason for what he did—for why he did it. Said he wanted me to be a part of it someday.” Stark looked off into a distance Yinsen knew only too well. It was a distance that fate had decreed a man could never bridge in his lifetime. “I always told myself it was this—what I do—but maybe…” After a moment, the child emerged again with a smirk.

“Stupid, huh? Dad didn’t really think much of me. I know it’s surprising, but I was kind of a disappointment to him.” He sighed. “Can’t imagine he’d ever really want me to be part of anything he did. Anything positive, anyway.”

“Fathers and sons rarely say what truly needs to be said,” Yinsen told him, refusing to look into his own distance. It was growing smaller every day, after all, and when he bridged it, he would say those things. “Maybe someday you will find that out for yourself.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Stark said quickly. “Not so much dad material, you know?” He sat back a bit and grinned. “You do a pretty good job, though,” he observed. “That pep talk you gave me, there in the beginning? Dad never quite got the hang of those. Your kids must be lucky to have you.”

Yinsen’s smile was forced, but he hoped the dim light made it seem less so. “As I said, sometime you will find out for yourself that it is not as easy as it seems. Nor as difficult. Perhaps when you leave here,” he suggested, watching Stark twitch. “You have a girlfriend, maybe?”

“No. Well there’s…” Stark shook his head, regret in his eyes. “No.”

He looked at the backgammon board before them and tossed the dice into it before standing. “Let’s see about getting you back to your family, at least, yeah?”

Yinsen watched him head for the workbench.

“So long as we do not send you to meet yours, my friend,” he murmured, rising to join him.

****

**2009**

A year and a half later, Tony Stark was only too ready to forego the _almost_ and just get to the business of dying. Unfortunately, by that point, he was too valuable to be allowed to.

_Iron Man, as the press had dubbed him, had single-handedly beaten into submission some of the roughest areas in the world. He was the ultimate deterrent—bound only loosely by the US government, his justice was at his own whims. Anyone doing evil could be his next target._

_His deep, if loose and hard to understand, code of ethics and growing distrust of nearly anyone in authority made him an object of scrutiny. S.H.I.E.L.D. had continued to grow since Howard Stark died, and Nick Fury kept a promise he’d given the elder Stark when he was a much younger man, a covert ops soldier suddenly reassigned to surveil the labs at Cambridge where Tony did his doctoral research in nanotechnology. He kept an eye on Tony—even after he’d lost the other one._

_Fury had never thought much of Tony Stark, though he knew Howard seemed to think his son was the key to a better world. He wasn’t going to be that key by flying around and blowing up terrorist cells, though, however much he and the press seemed to enjoy him doing it. When Stark started failing—spectacularly, publicly—Nick knew he had to take matters into his own hands. He had to make Stark into the man Howard had thought he would be._

_Whatever Howard Stark had been—and honestly, Nick Fury had never been quite certain what that was—at nearly forty,_ Tony _Stark wasn’t a hero at all. He hadn’t actually changed much from the playboy he’d been before Afghanistan. He just had a suit of armor to wear while he partied._

_A suit of armor that was hastening his death, pulling more and more power from his arc reactor, requiring more and more palladium, poisoning more and more of his blood until he sat on a donut in the middle of LA, looking to Nick like he was ready to just fall asleep and not wake up again._

_Which would have been unacceptable. Because Nick Fury never failed in a promise—at least one as important as the one he’d given Howard..._

Might have been one of the craziest weeks in Nicholas Fury’s life, but the damn thing was over now. Bruce Banner was off finding a foxhole to bury himself in and Nick’d left instructions to let him. He wasn’t sure what the Asgard situation was going to turn out to be, but a demigod? Largely out of his control.

Just like a certain playboy genius. Nick swirled the ice in his scotch as he watched Iron Man touch down just outside Stark’s Malibu mansion and descend into the basement through the new “secret entrance.”

Jarvis hadn’t been keen to let Nick in—but it wasn’t like he was asking. He’d give Tony ten minutes to de-suit and come up to the main floor. Else he’d go looking for him.

Howard had been right after all. Synthesizing a theoretical element in his God damned basement… Tony was all his dad thought he’d be—in every respect. After all, he _was_ trying to convince IUPAC to name the damn thing “badassium.*”

“He’s too much like me, Fury,” Howard had told him, years ago. “Life’s a game—he points and shoots long before he bothers to aim and the fact that he’ll usually hit the target anyway just makes him more unpredictable.” Howard had gotten a sad look in his eyes, then. “It’ll be the death of him one of these days.” And then he’d pegged Nick with a calculating glare. “Don’t let it be on your watch.”

So far, he’d done all right. Stark was recovering from the palladium poisoning at a rate that fascinated the doctors. Not that he’d let them get a good look at him, of course. Tony had the same problem with doctors his dad had had. The most they could get was a couple of blood samples and a quick scan. He’d be clear and clean in a month if he kept going the way he was, aside from some residual radiation damage. That wouldn’t heal, of course, but it didn’t appear able to stop him.

And he’d gotten awful interested in the idea of the Avengers Initiative, hadn’t he? Nick thought to himself with a smile. Maybe he _was_ like Howard, after all. Maybe he’d just needed to look his death in the face—really look at it this time, long and slow and painful. Nick knew from experience how waiting to bleed out tended to put things in perspective better than just ending up with a face full of shrapnel.

The sound of feet on the stairs had him lounging back further in his seat.

“So, my retainer is pretty much the same,” Stark said before he even reached the top of the stairs. “That thing in DC was just a one-time offer. Thanks for Stern, though—still have a hole in my chest. A _different_ hole in my chest. Medal was nice, though. I gave it to Happy.” He poured himself a scotch and sat across from Nick, looking more relaxed than Fury had ever seen him. “What do you need?”

“Always trying to be helpful,” Nick said, smirking in the darkness. He tossed a thick folder across the table. “But as usual, it’s what I can do for you, not the other way around.”

Stark looked at the cover of the file. A picture of his dad was stapled to it, old and yellow and crumbling. In typewriter ink the file read “Howard Anthony Stark: Head Scientist, Strategic Scientific Reserve.” A more modern label was slapped beneath it. “Director, S.H.I.E.L.D. Science Division.”

He didn’t open it and Nick wasn’t surprised. Instead, Stark sat back, taking a sip from his glass and looking out the window. “This was what kept him away from home all my life, huh?”

“More than he wanted to,” Nick allowed.

“He could have told me,” Tony said, hurt.

“You weren’t ready to hear it,” Nick replied. “You were so damn mad at him back then, you wouldn’t have listened to a word he said.”

Tony drained his glass in one go. “And how would you know that?”

“Guess I looked a little different back when I had two eyes,” he said quietly. “Though you spent enough time either hung over or up all night in the lab you probably never really noticed Dr. Welland’s assistant, did you?”

Stark barked out a laugh and got up to pour himself another. “Dad was keeping tabs on me?” He snorted angrily. “Could’ve just come himself instead waiting for you to update him on my latest girlfriend.”

“Hell, I gave up on that the second week in,” Nick shot back. “Damn list could take half a briefing.” He stood up, taking the bottle from Tony’s hands and pouring his own second. “Welland knew you were close to a breakthrough in nano-power cells—your first microgenerator, you remember? He alerted S.H.I.E.L.D. so we could protect you. A lot of people wanted that tech back then.”

“It didn’t work,” Tony said quietly, like that somehow made the surveillance unnecessary. “Blew up in my face—literally.” He took his seat again. “I remember Dad telling me I needed to stop putting the cart before the horse and figure the damn thing out. It was like proof that he thought I was a failure.”

“He never thought any such thing.” Nick shook his head and stood at the window and let the silence lengthen between them. “Read his file,” he said finally. “He’d’ve wanted you to.” It detailed some of Howard’s more spectacular failures, as well as his successes.

He made his way to the door, unsurprised when Tony didn’t move from his spot, staring at the unopened file before him. “And if you’re interested, I’m open to hearing where Romanoff might’ve got a few things wrong in her assessment of you for the initiative.”

“I’m not a textbook narcissist,” Tony replied immediately. “Not really a textbook _anything_.”

Nick smiled. “Ain’t that the truth. You know where to find me, Mr. Stark.”

The door closed behind him, and Nick let himself take a long, deep breath. “And I still know where to find you.”

******  
to be continued

 


	2. and One Time He Found Out Why He Didn't

**2016**

Tony Stark almost died a number of times after that. It became a kind of pattern for him. It was a few years, though, before he went into a situation _knowing_ he was much more likely to die than not.

_“We have entered the Age of Superheroes.” exclaimed one headline, days after the Battle of New York. It wasn’t really true. They’d been living in the Age of Superheroes for decades. That became all too clear when the internet was bombarded with S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra secrets a couple of years later._

_Unfortunately, they’d been living in the Age of Supervillains for decades, as well, which was the main reason why genetic experiments like Steve Rogers and radiation-induced mutations like Bruce Banner and people who were just plain good at killing, like Natasha Romanoff, were still given a fair amount of latitude when a particularly evil person had a particularly evil plan._

_By all appearances, Tony Stark wasn’t any of those things—he didn’t even fall under the umbrella of “medical experiment” anymore, now that he had synthetic bone where he used to have a miniature arc reactor attached to his aorta. He was simply a genius, billionaire, philanthropist—the role of playboy had been abdicated in favor of his long-term engagement to Pepper Potts, who he often thought was even more put-upon being in a relationship with him than his mother had been with his dad._

_While the discussions surrounding the decision had been spirited, the couple agreed that Tony should make another Iron Man suit upon Pepper’s recovery from the Extremis treatments. She understood him, after all. He_ was _Iron Man, suit or no suit. It was just easier with the suit sometimes._

_Those times like when giant robots were marching up Michigan Avenue while a nuclear bomb lay set to explode under the city of Chicago…_

Natasha felt the concussion of the explosion slam her hard into a nearby wall, but it wasn’t as bad as it should have been. Taking a deep breath, she looked up to see why.

“You know, this looks easier when Rogers does it.” Tony Stark crouched over her in his suit, the edges of it smoking slightly where he’d shielded her from the robot's energy blast. She’d lost sight of him an hour ago, somewhere down by the Museum of Science and Industry, but had been a little too busy to worry about it. It looked like he’d had some hard going. "Would've been nice to have the help."

“Bad week for troubles in the Sudan,” she agreed, pulling herself to standing and dusting herself off. She'd need one long, hot shower after this. “Looks like it’s up to the ordinary humans, this time.”

She recognized the whine of one of Clint’s EMP arrows as she caught her bearings. One of the robots suddenly froze ten yards away, disabled by the electromagnetic pulse.

“These arrows work great, Stark,” Clint said coolly, following that arrow up with a more satisfying explosive tip that blew apart the thing’s head. “Think you can make one that goes boom at the same time? This is just wasting shafts.”

“That sounds vaguely kinky. And I’ll work on it,” Stark replied absently, turning toward the two robots who were standing between Natasha and the tunnels that stretched throughout Chicago’s business district. “You know where it is?” he asked, rising into the air and heading for the robot on the left.

“Pretty good idea,” she replied, bracing herself to run.

Clint took out the robot on the right with another EMP with explosive follow-up while Stark made short work of the other. Natasha ran under and over the rubble and disappeared down the stairwell, intent on keeping the Second City from becoming Ground Zero.

Between her energy scanner and the walkway and train tunnel maps she’d memorized, it took Natasha less than fifteen minutes to enter what had once been a speakeasy forty feet below the main public library. She examined the bomb closely and cursed.

“Shit! Stark are you there?”

“Um, yeah.” He sounded pretty beat up and there were too many energy discharges in the background. “Sort of busy. What do you need?”

“A way to defuse a nuclear bomb with no working parts that’s set to blow in four minutes.”

“One moment, please.”

Whatever he did, Natasha could feel the rumble of it through the ground around her. Forty-five seconds later, a hole opened in the ceiling above her head and Iron Man dropped through.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, heading for the bomb and seeing what she saw—a sleek, unbroken metal shell with a holographic readout hovering just above the surface, now reading 3:06. “Yeah. No defusing that, I guess. Bad guys are getting smart.” He looked at it from all sides, but his suit didn’t miraculously find anything she’d missed.

“Okay, I’m going to get you out of here. If I screw this up, I'm hoping the blast’ll only take out a block or so but better safe than in little pieces, right?"

“What are you talking about? That thing will incinerate a mile at least.” And the fallout would devastate the entire region.

Tony grabbed her around the waist and shot through the hole he’d left in the ceiling. “Not if I wrap the suit around it to contain the blast.”

Natasha tried to relax her muscles and hold on tight, knowing from experience that Stark wasn’t the safest of flyers. “Can you do that?”

He paused in that way that she really hated. “In theory.”

“Stark—”

He set her down beside Clint on the Michigan Avenue bridge. The archer looked as battered as she felt, but at least he was only surrounded by a bunch of seriously defunct giant robots.

“See, the problem is that I'll need to stay there to maintain the shielding,” Stark explained, opening the face mask on his suit so they didn’t feel like they were talking to another robot. “The new prototype is keyed to my brainwaves. If I leave, it goes dead.” He looked almost sheepish.

“That’s not the smartest design in our line of work,” Clint put in, dropping exhaustedly onto a robotic foot.

“It's actually a brilliant design, once you install the remote navigation and security systems," Stark defended himself. "And this isn't a job it's a... hobby. A side venture at best. Anyway, I didn’t have a lot of time to get this new one up and running before they called us in, okay?”

“Your suit’s not airtight,” Natasha told him, looking at the numerous dents and the few tears evident in the exoskeleton. She didn’t see any alternatives to his idiotic plan, but if the radiation leaked out of the holes in the suit, he’d be risking himself for nothing.

“Nope,” he agreed, clearly steeling himself. “Hopefully the shielding will make up for it. I’ll collapse the entrances to the room and try to contain the fallout as much as possible. It’s buried pretty deep already.” He locked eyes with her for a moment. _God,_ she thought, feeling sick, _he’s really going to do this!_

“If this doesn't work and you actually survive it... Um, tell Pepper… something. Something good—or no, not something good, then she’ll know it wasn’t me.” He took a deep breath and Natasha devoutly wished she was somewhere else. She could see Clint’s jaw tighten to the point of snapping.

“Tell her I love her. And I’m stupid. And I’m sorry.”

“Detonation in one minute, thirty seconds, sir.”

Jarvis’s voice was like a switch and Stark suddenly grinned fatalistically at them both. “Okay. Always knew I’d go out glowing.”

“Stark?” Clint stood and held out his hand. “Good luck.”

“Too late for luck,” Tony muttered as they clasped arms. He gave Natasha one more look and she stood rooted to the spot, unable to comprehend that he’d pretty much just agreed to be buried with a nuclear bomb. He wouldn’t even have his suit to protect him.

And before she could think of anything to say about the stupidity of that sacrifice, he was gone.

“Shit.” Clint collapsed into himself, landing hard on the robot foot behind him. The anger on his face was probably mirrored on hers.

“Okay, I’m inside,” Stark said after a few seconds. There was a distant sound of structural collapse from the direction of the library and Stark was coughing when he spoke again. “All entrances closed. Hopefully that’ll hold in most of the radiation—I expect you to come dig me out, by the way. If I don't blow up Chi-town.”

His voice distorted, and it took a moment for Natasha to realize that it was because he’d removed the suit. “Fitting armor around the bomb… now.” She could envision that theatrical little dance he did with his toys, getting all the puzzle pieces to fit right. It hurt more than it should. “There we go. Nice. Jarvis, maximum shielding.”

“Maximum shielding, sir,” the computer agreed. “Detonation in twenty seconds.”

Natasha held her breath.

“Okay, so, on the off—” Whatever Stark had been about to say was drowned out in an explosion that shook the city enough to topple the few robot skeletons still standing. Clint reached for her and they both hit the ground hard. It was a long moment before Natasha was willing to get up again and they were both covered in dust when she did. Brick dust, though, not radioactive ash. Somehow, he’d done it.

“Stark?”

Clint looked at her like she was insane, but she’d seen the son of a bitch get out of worse situations. “Stark? Tony, God damn it, you answer me!”

But he didn’t. He didn't, damn him.

" _Mudak._ **" She grated quietly, dropping to sit on the ground as the helicopters started arriving. Coulson's new S.H.I.E.L.D. Just in time to miss the ending.

 

Clint disappeared at some point while she was giving her report—she figured he was giving a report of his own until he whistled low from the side of one of the choppers. He held up two radiation suits and a geiger counter and she slipped away from the busy agents.

"They won't miss them," he said quietly, shrugging into his suit while she did the same.

It took longer to get there than it should have, as they picked their way through the rubble. The ten-story brick library that had once stood tall and proud was askew and five floors tall, part dust and half-smashed metal, part gaping wound. A crater swallowed half of it, as well as edges of the surrounding buildings.

Natasha just stood. Staring.

“Radiation’s pretty low right here,” Clint told her, scanning the surrounding area, the geiger counter beeping dully. “Don’t know what it should be, but I don’t think it’s this.”

A voice came from behind them. “Stark must have been able to contain it almost completely. We’re reading low levels from a number of the nearby subway and pedway entrances, but it’s salvageable.”

Natasha turned and watched Coulson and his people advance. There was a time she’d trusted Phil Coulson with her life, but times had changed for everyone, and his agenda was no longer hers.

“Director,” she greeted him coolly. “Nice of you to join us.”

Clint was still fiddling with the piece of equipment in his hands, not bothering to even acknowledge Coulson’s arrival. He suddenly went very still. “Didn’t Stark say the suit was keyed to his brainwaves?” He stood taller, staring out at the crater before them. “Wouldn’t the radiation leak out once the suit turned off?”

Natasha spun back around. “He’s still alive in there.”

Coulson addressed his crew, a repressed excitement in his tone. “First priority is finding and containing the suit.” He didn’t finish the thought: in case Stark dies before we find him. “Two teams. We need ground-penetrating radar in here immediately. Start from the center and work out.” He turned to Natasha and Clint, seemingly impervious to their distrust. “I’d suggest you get to a safe distance, but I won’t insult you. Just stay out of the way.”

Clint looked up at the buildings that surrounded them, like he was trying to decide which one was safest to climb. He nodded to the pile of rubble that had once been the northeast corner of the public library. “Let’s head up and keep an eye out.”

And so they did. They sat on a large metal pediment adorned with waves and dips and animals and watched and felt the minutes and then hours pass. Natasha thought about calling Pepper and didn’t. She thought about informing Steve and Sam and Bruce and didn’t. She thought about how incredibly stupid Tony was for sacrificing himself and realized that she and Clint _and_ Tony and five and a half million other people would be dead or dying if he hadn’t.

 

“I have a body!”

The radar operator’s voice brought Natasha to her feet, balancing carefully on the remains of a steel and copper owl that once graced the library’s facade. The radar scanner was five yards out from the center of the crater. They’d already located the suit, one-hundred-and-fifty feet down, and were digging.

“Forty feet down. Can’t tell anything from here.”

“Get the second laser in there and dig,” Coulson called from his spot near the main excavation. “I want him cleared out of the crater as soon as possible. Don’t move him too far until we’ve found and contained the suit.”

“Only forty feet. He was still in the room, then. Think he tried to bury the bomb farther before it blew?” Clint murmured quietly. Natasha stared at him blankly for a minute, cursing her lack of focus. She’d forgotten he was there and she _never_ did that.

“Makes sense,” she replied dully. It was something Stark would think of at the last second—shove it down farther to contain more of the fallout. “Either that, or the concussion from the blast dropped it down a subway shaft.”

“Think he was far enough away to escape the rads?”

Natasha didn’t bother answering that. The blast wasn’t entirely contained by the suit—the destruction around them proved it. And where there was explosive force, there’d be radiation. Just because it hadn’t made it to the street didn’t mean it hadn’t made it to Tony.

The radar scanner was moved out of the way and a laser digger fired up and started cutting away at the mess that had once been State Street. Natasha took a deep breath and started heading down the pile of red brick and granite, hearing and feeling Clint following after her.

It was another hour and a half before they cut through to the room where Natasha had found the bomb. She was the first one down the rope, looking at the rubble and piles. The side of the room where the bomb had been was gone, swallowed by a wall of rock, but the entrance she’d used to come in from the subways was still there, filled with rocks and silt, but recognizable.

Like the foot sticking out of it.

“Tony?” she called, running forward as quickly as the bulky radiation suit would let her.

“Room’s flooded!” someone called behind her. “350 Rads at midpoint—seal the top, damn it! Seal it!”

Natasha looked up to find three faceless radiation suits at her side, each agent reaching out for the rubble before them. Natasha put a hand on Tony’s foot. “We’ll get you out, Stark,” she muttered, trying to decide whether the pulse she felt through her glove was just a figment of her imagination or not. “Just hold on, okay?”

Time ran funny, the way it sometimes did when an op went sideways, and Natasha was suddenly aware that bright lights had been set up and a huge lead coffin had been lowered into what was now the middle of the room.

“Team 2, golfball has been located and contained. Proceed.”

The words over the radio had no meaning, but the movement around her did. She was still holding Tony’s foot, but now she could see nearly all of him. They’d just about cleared his head and shoulders, and he lay face down, exposed and disturbing. The protective suit he often wore under his exoskeleton was torn in too many places and a short piece of metal grew from a bloody hole in his back.

“Agent Romanoff—”

“I’m not your agent,” she replied, meaning it to be cold and rude, but hearing it come out flat. Automatic.

“Natasha,” the man said instead. She looked up and saw Rich Myers. He’d been a rookie when Clint brought her into S.H.I.E.L.D. and he’d patched her up a few times after bad assignments. He was a good man. “Let us move him.”

She nodded, letting go of Tony’s leg and rising. Another agent she didn’t recognize ran a radiation scanner over his body and whistled. “Jesus. 567.3. Make your examination quick kids. We need to get him in the cocoon and seal it.”

Natasha found she couldn’t breathe suddenly. 400 Rads was a killing dose… She looked at Tony’s face as they turned him over to tend his wounds before they carried him to the protective tank—made to protect them, not him—and was amazed to see it completely unmarred, for now. Visions of radiation ulcers assaulted her for a moment and she stood still, regaining control.

“The penetration wound isn’t bad,” a medic was saying, running hands over his body as someone else secured the piece of metal in Stark’s belly. “Straight through, front to back. Two or three broken ribs. Looks like the left humerus snapped. Definite fracture of the left femur as well.” The man set about placing aircasts where they needed them.

What did it matter? She wondered, dazed. He was dead already, wasn’t he?

“Okay, let’s box him up.”

Like meat.

The top of the lead cocoon clanged down like the coffin top it was and Natasha just stared at the thick glass panel that showed Tony’s face.

“Internal radiation reads 502,” a medic said. “You must have been picking up residuals from the surrounding area before.”

“Doesn’t matter,” another of the faceless people answered. “We need to transport immediately. Figure out a decon protocol.” He shook his head. “God, I can’t believe he’s still breathing.”

“The Tower has a shielded lab below ground,” Clint said, pushing off from the wall he’d been leaning against. “Full decontamination. We’ll take him there.”

Natasha hadn’t noticed him. Second time today. She needed to be somewhere else. Her hands balled into fists. She needed to get _control_.

Someone activated the wind baffle they’d set up in the ceiling to try to prevent the radiation from leaking out, and a person climbed down the ladder. Natasha hadn’t even noticed those things being put in place. The disconnect terrified her—being compromised like this was a good way to get killed, she’d learned too early in life.

“Transporting him to New York is out of the question, Agent Barton—”

“I’m not your agent,” Clint replied, echoing Natasha’s earlier statement with much more emotion. “And neither is he.”

“Dr. Banner is one of the world’s foremost experts on radiation exposure,” She put in, finally coming back to herself a bit. “I’m sure Director Coulson will see the wisdom in letting _us_ deal with this.” Her tone left no doubt as to who _us_ was. The Avengers had become exactly what Nick Fury had always envisioned them being: a family that took care of their own.

“I think we have enough problems here, don’t you, Agent Crawley?” Coulson said as he descended the last couple of rungs of the ladder and turned toward them. His eyes managed to convey his sympathy even through the heavy visor of his hazmat suit. “Get Ms. Romanoff and Mr. Barton a helicopter and see to it Mr. Stark is returned home.”

Natasha didn’t thank him. Coulson didn’t seem to expect her to.

 

The helicopter ride was too long, too quiet, and too nerve wracking. Rich Myers agreed to accompany them to monitor the radiation cocoon. It was designed to encase victims who were either already dead or not expected to survive, which meant it had no monitors for vitals. Tony could have died five minutes into the flight, and Natasha would never know it until they were in the basement at Avenger Tower.

“Um, we have a problem here,” Rich called out, halfway through the flight. “I think the tank is losing integrity.” Natasha looked at the radiation monitor, which now read 495.

“The chopper’s shielded, though, right?” Clint asked in a worried tone. Natasha stiffened. It wouldn’t do anyone any good to trail radiation over the same area Stark had killed himself to protect.

“Yeah,” Rich assured them. “And we should be safe in our hazmat gear. But I need to radio ahead and have your team ready to contain this on the way to the lab.” He looked at his radiation badge and shook his head in confusion. “I’m not showing any acute contamination yet.”

Natasha went back to staring at the cocoon, trying to puzzle out her own reactions. She’d once told Fury that Tony Stark couldn’t be trusted to save anyone unless it was in his own best interests. This wasn’t. This was… being a hero. On the level of Steve Rogers, in fact. And she was furious with him for it—would be even moreso if he died.

If it was the first time he’d done it, she could understand the utter anger she felt. When someone defied your expectations, you hated them for it. At least a little. But he’d done it before. He’d flown a nuclear bomb into a wormhole with no assurance he could get back—she hadn’t hated him for that.

But she hadn’t trusted him then, had she? He’d been good in a fight. He’d been willing to stick his neck out—for the rush, mostly, she thought at the time, and for revenge. It wasn’t like now, when she knew him. Trusted him. Now, when she’d actually miss him when he died.

Oh, her world had changed, hadn’t it? Time was she could betray and be betrayed and just… live with it.

“Don’t you let me down, Stark,” she whispered. “Don’t you die on me.”

 

Four people were on the roof at Avenger Tower, waiting for them to land. Steve and Bruce didn’t bother with protective gear—they were beyond worrying about a little radiation—so she recognized them right off. Steve looked battered, though, and she wondered how the Sudan had worked out. It took landing and wheeling Tony’s pod out of the helicopter for her to recognize Pepper and Dr. Paul Marcus in their all-engulfing white suits.

“I can’t figure out why it’s venting,” Rich was telling Bruce as the doctor stepped up to get a look at Tony and to help wheel the tank toward the elevator. “Diagnostics say it’s unbreached, and our suits are all still on green, but I’ve lost 18 Rads since we left Chicago.”

“Let’s just get him downstairs and we’ll take a look,” Bruce said, forcing a calm Natasha was very much afraid he didn’t have. He’d hold it together, though. For Tony—for all of them. If anyone could bring Stark back from this, it would be Bruce.

“Tony?”

Pepper sounded lost and frightened, and Natasha turned to her, watching her lay her hand on the cocoon and peer in at her fiancé. Natasha stood close, but couldn’t bring herself to intrude.

“You’re home early,” Clint said quietly, addressing Steve with a touch of anger in his voice as the elevator doors closed and they descended.

Steve ignored the emotion. He probably felt guilty enough about it, himself. There wouldn’t have been anything he could have done if he were there, but she didn’t think that would stop him. “Coulson called. We got back as soon as we could.” He didn’t ask for an apology for not calling, and again, Natasha didn’t offer one.

“Where’s Sam?” she wondered aloud.

“Medical.” The clench of his jaw and the fact that he didn’t elaborate was all Natasha needed to know that Sudan had gone very, very badly. A bad day for everyone, it seemed.

Rich had been giving Marcus a rundown of Tony’s injuries, and the recitation of them had left Pepper leaning against the tank with worry. “How can you treat him?” she asked in a sad little voice. “If you can’t even let him out of the tank…”

“Once we get him into the radiation room, we should be safe to get him out and take a look,” Bruce assured her.

Marcus nodded. “I’m not generally a trauma surgeon, but I can handle his injuries—even in this get-up.”

“And the radiation?” Pepper sighed, biting her lip. “He’s had a lot, you know?”

Natasha knew Pepper wasn’t just talking about today, and so did Bruce. Of all of them, save maybe Bruce himself, Tony was the most likely to glow in the dark.

“Like I said, let’s just have a look,” Bruce said quietly, offering nothing.

 

It seemed hours later that Natasha was standing in the observation gallery above Tony’s room, fresh from decontamination and the long hot shower she’d been yearning for just that morning, watching Bruce and Marcus examine Tony.

The cell below was just like a regular hospital room, mostly, if you discounted the wind baffle at the door and the eight-inch thick radiation-resistant glass on the observation  window. And Tony looked okay now that his leg and arm had been casted and his belly wound stitched up—he looked _fine_. Beaten all to hell, but they’d all been that at one time or another… but fine. No skin lesions, no problems breathing, no bleeding.

“I don’t get it, Dr. Banner,” Marcus said after running the geiger counter over Stark’s body once more. “There’s no reason this should be happening.”

“There’s a reason,” Bruce said. He looked up into the gallery, eyes searching beyond her to find Steve. “I just never thought it applied to him.”

He cleared his throat, turning back to Tony. “I need to look at his medical records. And we need a DNA sample to determine what kind of damage the radiation has done.” He smiled at Marcus, but Natasha could tell there was something he wasn’t saying. “Let me go brief Pepper and see if I can get some answers from his files.”

It took twenty minutes for Bruce to come out from decontamination, and he headed straight for the computer when he did.

“Bruce, how is he?” Pepper asked quietly. She knew something more was going on, too, but she clearly needed an immediate answer.

“He’s good,” Bruce answered. “Disturbingly good in fact. Better than he has a right to be.”

Pepper bristled. “What does that mean?”

Bruce stood away from the computer and faced her. “The radiation levels are dropping at an accelerated rate,” he started. “He shows no signs of decreased platelet counts, no signs of fluid in the lungs, and no signs of nervous system dysfunction.”

“And that’s all…?” Clint asked, though Natasha knew he knew the answer.

“Not normal,” Bruce answered shortly. “His body is metabolizing the radiation.” Again, he looked at Steve, who had turned back to the window to watch Tony, his hands gripping the rail in front of him too tightly. “There’s only two people I know of who can do that.”

“Howard was part of Project Rebirth,” Steve said in a whisper. “But I can’t imagine he’d experiment on his own son.”

Natasha froze. They couldn't possibly be saying...

“What?” Pepper said, shaking her head in denial. “No. No, Tony—he breaks a bone every other month. Natasha can take him in the ring." Natasha was vaguely insulted by that. She could take any of the guys in the ring, except Steve, of course, but he hardly counted. "He’s not a super anything!”

“I can’t tell for sure until I finish the DNA testing, but it makes sense.” Bruce turned back to the computer, leafing through medical files. “Why are Tony’s files so thin?” he asked, frustrated.

“Howard’s mother died of an infection she caught in the hospital when she was pregnant with his little sister. The baby died, too.” Pepper was just letting the words spill out while her brain was occupied elsewhere. “He never trusted hospitals—had a private doctor who used to come to the house if he was needed. Tony was always the same. Worse even, since he’ll never admit when he’s hurt. And once the arc reactor was in place, he just didn’t feel like it was safe to allow people access to that.”

“Makes this inconvenient,” Bruce said with a sigh, continuing to go through the files.

“I still can’t believe Howard would do that to his son intentionally,” Steve muttered. He had that old pain in his voice—the one Natasha knew too well herself. Too many people turned out not to be what you thought they were. “It must have been an accidental exposure. Something—”

“His father blew him up when he was six,” Pepper blurted out. All eyes turned toward her and she startled at the sudden scrutiny. “Um… Tony told me once that when he was six he snuck into his dad’s lab and his dad accidentally blew him up. Or, I mean, there was an explosion….”

Bruce nodded absently and looked at the medical report before him. “He was given a sixty-forty chance of surviving the surgery that removed the shrapnel three years ago,” he said. “He was up and walking around in a week.” He carded through to another report. “Between cosmic radiation and internal injuries, he should have died before we got to the shawarma restaurant….”

“But the palladium poisoning almost killed him,” Natasha put in. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want to believe this, but Tony Stark with super powers just seemed… wrong. “That was radiation, and he didn’t miraculously heal himself there.”

“He was clear of all contamination in six weeks once he stopped exposing himself to the stuff twenty-four hours a day,” Bruce said, pulling up the file on that incident. “I call that superhuman.”

“He’s reacted badly to radiation before,” Pepper said vaguely. “Very badly.” Bruce nodded, Steve looked abruptly uncomfortable, and Natasha wondered what the story was there and why she didn’t know it.

“I do, too,” Bruce replied with a self-deprecating smile, burying whatever memory the three of them shared. “Doesn’t stop me from getting the common cold.”

“Tony doesn’t get colds,” Pepper answered automatically. She looked suddenly horrified. “Oh my God! Tony _doesn’t_ get colds! Ever.” She sat down hard and barely breathed for a long moment. “He’s going to be insufferable.”

Natasha couldn’t help adding her own to the tiny grins that broke out on Clint and Steve’s faces.

“ _More_ insufferable,” Steve corrected her.

“So he’ll be all right?” Pepper asked, shocked and confused, but desperate for a positive bottom line.

“We have to figure out exactly what ‘all right’ is for him, but yeah.” Bruce grinned. “Yeah, if his radiation levels keep dropping. He should be all right.”

 

And he was. It was a day before he regained consciousness—which Bruce theorized was as much because of the increased strain on his body’s regenerative capacity as it was the concussion he’d received when the bomb blew. He did suffer some delayed radiation poisoning symptoms which kept him too sick for a week or so to do much more than look for Pepper to be nearby every time he woke. It seemed like they'd been through this before, but Pepper didn't seem willing to discuss it, so Natasha let it go for now.

His DNA was only slightly skewed in Bruce’s view. Nothing like Steve’s or his, but a variant on the theme. He wasn’t invincible like the Hulk and it didn’t look like he’d live for much longer than a normal person the way they theorized Steve would, but he shared their ability to survive radiation, though on a slightly lower scale. He could be hit by a bus and die like everybody else, if it hit hard enough. If it didn’t, he’d recover faster and more completely than your average person. Basically, he was Tony Stark: genius, billionaire, philanthropist, kind-of-super hero.

And the Avengers needed to decide what to do about that.

A week and a half after the incident, Tony was moved into a hospital bed on the medical floor. His radiation levels were safe for other people to be around him and it was frankly more comfortable for everyone to be out of the radiation protection zone and its endless decontamination protocols.

He was finally getting to the point where he was ready to deal with the knowledge Natasha and the rest of them had been chewing over since Bruce discovered the secret she was certain Tony had never known.

“Natasha,” he greeted her as she walked into his otherwise empty room. He was clear eyed and looking rested for the first time in a long time. “I’m bored. There’s nothing on television, I can’t play any games with only one arm, and Pepper had to go run the company or something.” He put his right hand behind his head, grunting at the awkwardness of the cast that ran from his left shoulder to his fingers. “Amuse me.”

She smiled and took a seat. “I thought you'd be glad to take a day, Tony,” she said, glad to see him feeling like himself again. Though that probably wouldn’t be a good thing once the discussion got started.

"A day, sure," he shot back. "Now I'm just _bored_."

Sam wheeled his way into the room next, followed by Clint, who nodded to them both. Sam looked worse than Tony did, but he was recovering. And griping about the fact that he didn’t have what he was now jokingly referring to as “the good genes”.

Tony looked immediately suspicious. “What?”

Steve came in and stood quietly against the wall, looking troubled. She’d have to get to the bottom of that. Bruce was last to enter, and Tony focused on him. “What?” he repeated, a little more forcefully this time. “What, am I glowing now?” He looked down at himself and spread his hands. “Seriously? I don’t think I’m glowing, but…” Bruce stepped forward, obviously sensing that Tony’s worry was real and getting a little out of control.

“I know you’ve heard this before, Tony, but you’re lucky to be alive.”

“Yeah,” Tony allowed, wary. "I have heard that before. What are you going to say that I _haven't_?"

“We think we know why you are.”

Natasha fought not to smile as Bruce brought a file up on the screen that took up the wall beside Tony’s bed. The file showed three DNA samples: Bruce’s, Steve’s, and Tony’s, with the similarities highlighted and annotated. The best way to explain anything to Tony Stark without him talking you to death first? Show it to him.

Tony stared at the data for a very long time, long enough for them all to begin to feel more uncomfortable than they already were.

“You know, Dad tried to blow me up when I was, like, six, I think.” Tony said the words flippantly, but he couldn't seem to take his eyes from the screen. "I snuck into his radiation lab and the next thing I knew, I woke up a day later."

Natasha watched him finally activate the three-dimensional interface and pull his own DNA sample to him, scrutinizing the parts Bruce had highlighted. His one mobile hand was shaking slightly, causing the image to flicker.

“We think that might have been when it happened,” Bruce agreed.

“Only time I was ever really _sick_ sick in my life,” Tony murmured. He looked through the holographic projection to lock eyes with Bruce. “Is this real? Like… 'I’m a superhero' real?”

“Yeah, here it comes,” Sam muttered, sounding disgusted. But there was a grin on his bruised face.

“No, no, seriously,” Tony said, and Natasha was glad to see him trying in his usual way to make this as _un_ serious as possible. “I’m a superhero, right? Do I get a badge or something?” He looked at Steve and Natasha could see his eyes narrow slightly at the other man’s body language. “I don’t have to wear a spangly outfit, do I?”

Steve finally smiled, thin though it was. “I've already started working on it,” he said softly. His eyes went coldly serious all too quickly, though. “We should talk about this. Up to now, you've just been an guy in a suit. Is this something you want people to know?”

Natasha really thought Tony was going to say yes, absolutely, so she was surprised when he matched Steve’s tone. “No. No one knows—not even Coulson.” Would Tony ever stop being mad at the director for not informing them he was alive? “What, I don’t have enough of a target on my back? This room. And Pepper.” He got a strange look in his eyes and Natasha wondered whether he was thinking about the same thing that she and Pepper had discussed a couple of days ago. Pepper was still young enough for them to think about children, after all.... She’d bring it up with Bruce later.

“Paul Marcus was the only other one to treat you here,” Bruce told him. He seemed relieved Tony wasn’t planning a press conference. “He can be discreet.”

“The radiation container was faulty,” Natasha said, revealing the alibi they’d set up. Bruce had made sure it was before it made its way back to S.H.I.E.L.D. and Rich had already been suspicious about that before he left. “You’ll be recovering for weeks, but the radiation damage wasn’t as severe as it first seemed.”

“Downtown Chicago might beg to differ,” Tony shot back quietly.

“Half a mile of ground is contaminated and they won’t be rebuilding the underground rail lines for the next ten thousand years, but it’s better than losing hundreds of miles to fallout.” Clint looked Tony in the eye. “Your stupid move saved a lot of people.”

Tony was silent for a long moment before he smirked half-heartedly. “Well, of course, cause I’m a superhero.”

“I hear you say that one more time, man,” Sam told him, “I’m gonna have to deck you.”

“You’d take on a superhero?”

Natasha caught his eye to let Tony know she knew why he was doing this. He wasn’t ready to talk about it, so he talked about it. “I’ve taken him.”

“In my defense, I _was_ dying that time,” he said, subtly conveying his thanks.

“Apparently not,” Bruce put in.

“Yeah, you have no room to talk,” Tony shot back. “Last time someone shot you, the Big Guy dug the bullet out and threw it back.”

“Hit him, too,” Clint put in.

It escalated from there, and Natasha began to relax for the first time since she’d entered that concrete room under Chicago.

She could get used to a family like this. Especially when they went out of their way not to let her down.

******  
the end

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ** _mudak_ = asshole [Russian]

**Author's Note:**

> *"badassium" courtesy of the tie-in comic _Nick Fury's Big Week_.


End file.
